What? I had a stroke? Is that why dwirsafj?

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Monthly Archives: April 2012

And in one swell foop, the foot is on the other shoe. I mean what comes around goes around. I mean you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. I mean tomorrow’s always better than yesterday.

I mean that CF broke her arm.

This is not good. It is her right arm, which is the wrong arm for her to break, not that there is a right arm to break, but this is definitely the wrong arm, because she is right-handed. Thus she is immediately hampered in everything she does, including but not limited to everything she does.

For example, when we went to go to the hospital on Sunday, the day that she broke her arm, my car keys could not be found, because someone who shall remain nameless (but amazingly has the same initials as I do, not to mention the same name) did not put them back in the one and only place where I keep them and CF was in such pain that we had to take her car with her steering it and me shifting. That worked out fine, because her car has power steering and she could steer one-handed.

But coming home she was completely bonkered on painkillers so strong it took two nurses to wrestle them down her throat, which meant that I had to drive, which presented a problem, because, unlike my car, her car does not have hand controls, which I use to drive. Oh, I probably haven’t mentioned that before. I use hand controls to drive. That way, my feet are useless appendages in the car. My hands do all the appendaging.

The last time I used my feet to drive was, coincidentally I swear, the time someone ran into me head-on at an intersection (the other driver was at fault I swear—she got a ticket, I was at a dead stop waiting to turn left and she came straight through a yellow light in a left-turn only lane) and it wasn’t until we were halfway home from the hospital that I realized I was driving the very same car that that accident happened in. I should point out that I did use my hands on the steering wheel and used my feet only on the pedals, as I am sure most of you do. It is only in my car that my hands are used exclusively. Nowhere are my feet used exclusively. But my hands and feet did get us home, seven appendages unscathed, one scathed but splinted.

Speaking of being hampered in everything she does, I had to secretly wipe my brow and thank all of my lucky stars that she broke her arm right after she finished cleaning nearly every room in the house. Phew. I would not have looked forward to doing that. Now I need to clean only our bedroom and bath. She had even picked up all of the dog poop in the back yard.

The truth is, CF does more than her fair share of everything in our household, because I had this Thing happen last August, which is why I keep wondering Who Stole My Brain to begin with. I can, when pressed, zap a dinner for myself and can even cook a frozen pizza for our son, as long as CF writes down the directions every time, but beyond that I am of little use in the kitchen. I did drive through Crap-in-the-Box for him for lunch the day he surprised me with a trip to his teacher’s office, which showed more motherly skills in one day than I had for many months.

But the whole cleaning thing tends to make me nauseated, all that up-and-down motion, not to mention back-and-forth, not to mention to-and-fro. (Is “fro” short for something? Seems like it should be, because it’s sort of short. But no, just fro.) I used to love to vacuum, but now just the sound of it makes me ill, just like the smell of watermelon makes me ill. Not to mention cantaloupe. I am not good around melon salad. Or sucking sounds.

It is largely propitious that I started to drive before CF chose to dance on her wrist bone, don’t you think, so that I did not have to start driving in the heat of the moment? I spent most of Monday driving one or another member of my family to one or another doctor, and for the first time in many months none of the appointments were mine. I had to take a two-hour nap when we finally got home at 4:30.

And really I have no idea how I am going to muster the energy and skills needed to keep our household in livable, sanitary enough condition to support the three of us. We will at least have milk, because that is home-delivered. And, if given enough sitting-down time, I think I can haul our never-ending supply of daily newspapers to the recycling bin, and I think I can nag our son into hurling the trash to the curb and dragging our dog around the block. And even though I failed this part of the test at Brain Retraining School, I’m pretty sure it’s dishes into the dishwasher and clothes into the washing machine, right?

Every family has its own holiday traditions. Some gather ‘round the spinet to yodel out the carols; others spin the dreidel; others hunt the boggy beds for plastic eggs filled with cash or chocolate; others look forward to a nice piece of hamentash come Purim.

Mine invented a new one for itself this Easter. We made dioramas.

The idea, alas, wasn’t ours, although it should have been. It was right up our alley. After all, we invented the tradition of recreating the Thanksgiving meal in Play-Doh some 30 years ago. But that’s another story. Continue reading →

Here in Washington State, if your eyes roll back into your head and you twitch all over as if you have somehow plugged yourself into the high voltage switch where your electric dryer should go, you’re not supposed to drive for six months. They don’t send anybody out to check up on you to make sure, but they expect you to check in with your doctor before you get behind the wheel again.

They call it “being seizure free for six months,” and I am now officially well past that point. I have yet to drive the car down the driveway.

When I was trapped in the hospital wrapped in a burqa listening to Fox News All. The. Time., the thought of not driving for six months drove me out of my mind. Wait. Can I say that? My mind was not injured. It was my brain. So yes, I guess I can say it figuratively drove me out of my mind. I don’t want to conjure up any images of little slices of my brain flopping about the hospital without me. Continue reading →

Sometime in January we managed to pry our son’s baseball uniform off of him so we could wash it in time for the games that began again last week. Actually, he outgrew the uniform, which was helpful, because it was really starting to stink.

He does have one non-uniform shirt. He got it from his baseball team. It reads, “There’s no off-season in baseball.” They mean it. But they do take the month of December off.

But now that the purportedly nice weather is here again in Olywa (which means that we are moving towards the 10 days of relatively light sprinkling rain before we hit the three months of dry scorching drought before we hit the nine months of daily downpour) (and people LOVE it here!), it’s time for all of us parents to get our baseball gear in gear too.

My son’s gear has been in his baseball bag since time began, well, since he joined this baseball club, which was four years ago. We dump it out from time to time, extract the empty bottled water bottles, gum wrappers, unidentifiable icky matter, unspeakably petrified sock remnants, hot dog fragments, and a Continue reading →